10/27/2008 @ 6:00PM

Ghoulish Gold

Looking for a solid investment in this difficult financial market? Try celebrity body parts. The current owner of Napoleon Bonaparte’s penis, Evan Lattimer of Englewood, N.J., recently turned down an offer of $100,000 for the fabled organ. Not bad for a relic purchased in 1977 by her father, the famous Columbia University urologist Dr. John Kingsley Lattimer, for a mere $3,000–about $10,000 in today’s money.

Napoleon should be proud, given that his manhood was often the butt of cruel jokes while he was alive. (The item is not exactly imposing today: Dried out like a piece of beef jerky, the mummified organ is only about an inch and a half long, laid on a wad of cotton wool, although the antique leather presentation case in which it is preserved is very tasteful, embossed with a gold crown and the letter “N”).

Le Petit Corporal isn’t the only deceased militant bringing in the bucks. A lock of Che Guevara’s hair sold for $100,000 last year in Dallas. (It had been cut from his corpse by CIA operatives after he was killed in Bolivia.)

But not every body part hits the jackpot. Take Albert Einstein’s eyeballs, which the scientist’s former ophthalmologist, Henry Abrams, reportedly still keeps in a safety deposit box. Abrams, who is now 96, tried to sell the items in the early 1990s. The figure of $5 million was bandied about, and rumors spread that Michael Jackson was interested–who else?–but then Abrams got cold feet and the whole sale collapsed.

Still, the investment potential is huge. And luckily, there are enough celebrity body parts available to make up a luminary Frankenstein.

Abraham Lincoln’s skull fragments are on display in Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. They have never been up for sale, but the president’s blood-stained shirt collar will go under the hammer on Nov. 20, touted in the auction catalog as “the finest single ‘blood relic’ that exists” from the assassination night at Ford’s Theater.

Galileo’s withered finger can be seen in a museum in Florence, Italy, where it is kept in an egg-shaped glass resembling a football trophy. Bits of President Grover Cleveland’s jaw are on display in the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. Beethoven’s ear bones were removed during autopsy and passed around by collectors for years. They were lost in the later 19th century but may yet resurface on the market–after all, parts of his skull turned up in California in 2005.

Given the recent collapse of the global equities markets, maybe investors should give up trading stocks and begin haunting the world’s top celebrity cemeteries, like Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles, where Marilyn Monroe is buried, or the Père Lachaise in Paris, home to luminaries ranging from Oscar Wilde to Jim Morrison. Admittedly, you really have to have the stomach for this sort of memorabilia trading. When push comes to shove, many financial dilettantes may baulk at the prospect of having pieces of Napoleon or Beethoven lying around the house. It might all seem a little, well, creepy.

On the other hand, perhaps our interest in celebrity body parts isn’t entirely morbid. There’s something very human about this fascination, as if we must convince ourselves that these astonishing historical figures were once actual living beings, not demigods who sprang from the heavens. They had awkward adolescences, suffered dental problems, fell in and out of love. Our interest springs from the same source as our passion for lurid celebrity gossip that dominates tabloids. Buying Einstein’s eyeballs is only a step away from the trade in Madonna’s bras or George Clooney’s cuff links.

Personally, I would rather own Napoleon’s baguette than Justin Timberlake’s boxer shorts. But everyone has his own heroes.